The Continued and Necessary Call to Close Rikers

As activist and organizer from the Freedom Agenda, Sarita Daftary stated recently,

With less than one year left in Mayor de Blasio's tenure, he must use the full extent of his power in the next 11 months to advance the closure of Rikers, to reduce incarceration, and to protect the human rights of incarcerated people.

Rikers Island is an unsafe, purely punitive institution that isolates those inside from support, family, even their lawyers and other resources. [these are people, men and women only accused of a felony and spend an average of 95 days behind bars]

In view of the pandemic, the stark and persistent injustices of our legal and law enforcement systems, the call to close Rikers and provide community resources and alternatives to our carceral system are as important as ever.

Keep reading to hear more about

  • Why this work and call needs to continue

  • The powerful perspectives of a youth organizer

  • How you and your organization can be a part of the work

The Injustices

For hundreds of young people on Rikers Island trying to finish high school, even Zoom is out of reach. Since the pandemic shut down face-to-face learning in March, city jails have yet to set up video conferencing for incarcerated students attempting to continue their education following an arrest. READ MORE

“The loss of ID can have devastating consequences. It is required to apply for a job, cash a check, rent an apartment or seek for government benefits. Discharging people from jail without ID “is like stripping people of all basic necessities,” said Jack Powers, an employee of Friends of Island Academy, a group that works with youth leaving Rikers. “How can you put someone on the sidewalk with nothing, when you have taken it, and expect them to retrieve the essentials?” READ MORE

According to the Marshall Project's tracking of COVID-19 throughout the country, to date, there have been over 300,000 cases of coronavirus reported among prisoners. Due to the density of correctional settings and inability to comply with the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control, i.e. mask wearing, six foot social distancing, lack of efficient testing and the inability to exercise constant handwashing has caused many incarcerated people to fall ill and many have died across this country. Because the correctional facilities have failed to test all incarcerated people, the true infection rate has not been determined in New York or throughout the carceral system in this country.

New York has the second highest number of people in prison serving a parole-eligible life sentence in the country—roughly 9,500 people—and is one of only a handful of states with more than 8,000 incarcerated older adults. the coalition of advocates across New York State in our collective call for Albany lawmakers to pass elder parole and fair and timely parole

The Call

My name is Mya Fortuna and I am in the Liberation Program of The Brotherhood/ Sister Sol. I am here because mass incarceration needs to end NOW! Rikers needs to close NOW!

Mass incarceration has cost our communities so many lives. Mass criminalization has forced too many of us to live under surveillance and stigmatized in our schools, communities, and cities. We have lost too many people, my people, because of structural oppression. The truth remains, money is being spent to destroy the lives of people of color and it should instead go to help our communities. 

We need to spend money to keep people out of the criminal justice system and one way to do that is to spend more money on education. 1 in 331 Americans is a NYC public school student. I’ll say that again, 1 in 331 Americans is a NYC public school student yet these are the same people whose needs our city ignores. 

The first step to building our communities—to doing things like investing in our schools, actually providing mental health support, giving students access to meaningful after school activities and employment—is closing Rikers. Keeping people on Rikers is keeping our communities in chains. Keeping people on Rikers is much more expensive than investing in our communities. It costs about $337,000 to keep a person on Rikers but only $25,000 to educate a NYC student. That means $312,000 more is spent to help keep people at the bottom instead of using that to help us get to the top. Our city government would rather find billions of dollars to keep someone incarcerated than spend billions of dollars to free 1.1 million students by way of education. That’s not good, moral math. 

Rikers needs to be shut down and the funds that come from shutting Rikers down should be reinvested in our communities, especially in our schools. Having made our world so terrible—breaking up families, kidnapping people in the name of justice—our city needs to now make a world where mass incarceration, mass criminalization does not exist. 

NYC needs to invest more in our success NOT our downfall.  

Mya Fortuna is a 17-year-old Dominican-American activist raised in Harlem. As a member of the Liberation Program (LP) of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, Mya works to end the school-to-prison pipeline, abolish the criminalization of young people, and increase the NYC budget for student support staff so as to truly give students what they need to successfully navigate education systems. This summer, Mya facilitated political education workshops in LP’s Summer Liberation School on Ethnoracial Identity and Oppression, Crimmigration, Reproductive Justice, Gender Inequities, and more. A rising senior at Pace High School, Mya also loves to play basketball and build community with other youth. In her free time, she is hanging out with her family—especially her nephew, and dreaming up a better world
Instagram: _.Mya._aa
Facebook: Mya Fortuna

The Opportunities

What can you do?

  • Find out where your elected officials stands and what they have done in relation to these issues [find out who represents you HERE and HERE]

  • Attend mayoral town halls so you can hear from and ask of the candidates where they stand on these issues

  • Sign up to support, sign on to petitions, and share these opportunities on your social media pages

  • A faith based coalition in New York is working to provide ID’s, healthcare, and adequate housing options to those being released from jails and prisons

  • The #LetMyPeopleGoNow! Campaign led by Chaplain Kim Eliano is asking people to to sign this petition ask for those incarcerated with pre-existing conditions, lower level offenses and who pose no threat to be released today [as well as provide vaccinations and PPE to incarcerated individuals] Because of pre-existing conditions, many incarcerated people are more vulnerable to COVID-19.

  • A growing list of faith communities and leaders from around New York are calling on our elected officials to end unjust and unnecessary bail and parole regulations that will keep people out of jail and/or from unnecessarily going back

  • The Freedom Agenda have written a detailed letter to the mayor on the why’s, what’s and how’s of Closing Rikers